A Study of Two Fluids Mixing in a Helical-Type Micromixer

The mixing behavior of two fluids in a passive micromixer with Y-type inlet and helical fluid channel, along with herringbone grooves etched on the base of the fluid channel, was studied with computer simulation technique and experiments. The mixing of pure water and acetone solution under different Reynolds numbers and acetone concentrations were investigated. An image inspection method using the variance in contrast of the image gray level as the measurement parameter was adopted to calculate the mixing efficiency distribution. Inspection results show that the mixing efficiency is decreased with the increase of the concentration of the acetone solution, but the mean mixing efficiency around the outlet can reach to a value of 90% even the Reynolds numbers of the fluids were as low as Re = 1, and the best efficiency for the case of Re = 10 is over 98%. The results show that the proposed micromixer is possible applied to the field of biomedical diagnosis